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"A human being should be able to change a
diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a
building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone,
comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Thursday, 13 May 2010

Xubuntu 10.4 on Sempron 2400 (full install)

The third and last act of the upgrade season is the desktop computer (Sempron 2400) upgrade. Unfortunately, because my recent switch from Ubuntu to Xubuntu I suppose, I cannot proceed with a regular upgrade. The upgrade process stops after the sources gathering phase with this message.

I so decided to go for a plain install in order to, eventually, have a much cleaner system.

Before installing

Before installation I only had to back-up my home folder since all data I have are kept in the home folder or in NTFS partitions that will remain untouched by the installation process.

I then downloaded Xubuntu install disk image from its download page and prepared a boot disk on a 1GB USB disk using Ubuntu's boot disk creator.

Installation process

Xubuntu installation process is a quite simple task driven, at the beginning, by an easy eight phases wizard user interface. The only phase that needed a little of attention has been, of course, the disk partitioning one.

Since I was overwriting the previous Linux installation I selected the “sdb4” partition, an easy choice since it was the only ext3 formatted, and instructed the installation program how to use it.

the same I repeated for the swap partition (without the need of the “format” flag this time). Once partitioning choices where made and after confirming the last question the installation process started.

Apart from graphics changes I only had to install some applications I use more frequently (Open office, Hughin, Picasa) and restore the backed-up home folder to have back my fully working, and a lot much cleaner, Xubuntu desktop computer.